mea culpa

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

What more do I have to give to you than this string of carefully put together words?
There's an awkward, shy smile that beams foolishly at your sight.
A bunch of ridiculous, cheesy lines that you never seem to find funny.
There are my hands that fit yours perfectly, but we never do hold hands in public.
There is no ring on my finger too.

I can't fly off to exotic locales with you either, even when I want to have you all to myself.
I can't even play you a song on a guitar.
No verse I can sing to make you forget the weariness of this world.

I'm not even the looker, no fabled Greek goddess, who has adoration come to her easily.

But you're kind my love.
For you see in my words little traces of magic.
You see in them the quiet memory of a nightly walk by the ocean.
In them you listen to my laughter, look deep within my sunken eyes.
With these words you travel with me to places we could not go today.
I write, like you sing your songs, perhaps.
You sing because it comes to you without the expectation of applause.
I will give you everything in me, and more.
But on nights when we are far, take these words from me.
They may not be much, but they will make you smile, maybe.
They will make you smile.
And that is enough.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Here is an exclusive extract from Barkha Dutt's new
book This Unquiet Land – Stories from India's Fault Lines. It
resonates with me on such a deep level.

I was not even ten when I was first sexually abused. The perpetrator was a
distant older relative who had come to stay with us for a short period of time.
Like many Punjabi households, ours was an open house, always welcoming to
cousins and their friends, and their friends in turn. Today, decades later, I
cannot even recall the precise connection of this man to my family. But, to a
child's eye, he was avuncular and affectionate and, in any case, I just assumed
I was safe in my own home.

Little did I imagine that this
much-older, family figure - someone who would take the kids for piggy-back
rides and twirl us around in the air - could be such a monster. Worse still, as
a child unable to process the magnitude of what had happened - I was the one
who felt grotesque and dirty. The concept of teaching your child to distinguish
between 'good touch' and 'bad touch' had not yet become the enlightened norm.
But after the first few times I had innocently followed him to 'play' with him
in his room, I was overcome by panic and disgust.

Ridden with guilt, unable to
shake off the feeling of being dirty and trapped in a sink of fear, I finally
told my mother that something terrible had happened. My assaulter was
immediately thrown out of the house and I buried the awfulness of the memory in
a deep, dark place that I hoped I would never have to revisit. As I grew older,
what stayed with me, strangely enough, was the rancid smell of hair-oil; even
years later, anything that smelt faintly similar made me nauseous. In my
growing years, I blocked out the man's face, his name, in fact the very
incident was banished to the recesses of my consciousness; but from that moment
onwards, sexual abuse had an odour.

It was the loneliest and most
frightened I had felt as a child and the fear lurked in the shadows, following
me into adulthood. I discovered that I was often wary, even scared, of sexual
relations - a familiar consequence for those who had experienced abuse as
children.

I didn't know it then but my
experience, horrible as it was, was hardly uncommon. In 2007, the first ever
government survey of child sexual abuse uncovered that more than half the
children spoken to (53 per cent) said they had experienced some form of sexual
abuse. Twenty per cent of those interviewed said they had been subjected to
severe abuse, which the report defined as 'sexual assault, making the child
fondle private parts, making the child exhibit private body parts and being
photographed in the nude'. Yet, the silence of young victims and the misplaced
shame they felt shielded the perpetrators. These were men deeply embedded in
the family structure, it made it that much more difficult to call them out. The
report found that 31 per cent of the sexual assaults were by an uncle or
neighbour. So it wasn't surprising that over 70 per cent of children had never
spoken to anyone of what was done to them.

The toughest discovery for me
was to find that feminism offered no shield against the vulnerability,
confusion, guilt and rage you felt when you were abused.

As a young adult who
experienced violence in a personal relationship for the very first time as a
postgraduate student at Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia University, my response was
less confused but no easier to act on. By now I was a self-aware young woman
with strong opinions. I thought I was difficult to intimidate. I believed I
would know exactly what to do if a man I was dating ever hit me. Of course I
would take him to the cops, I would say with confidence when we sat around
discussing how unfriendly the legal system was towards women. I thought I was
never going to stand for anything like domestic abuse. It went against every
book I had read, every principle I held as sacred and every bit of my
self-image. Until it happened.

I was briefly in a
relationship with a fellow student at the university's mass communication
centre. It was a very different environment from the people-like-us safety of
St Stephen's. Budding filmmakers exemplified every depressing cliche you could
think of. Everyone smoked; you even lit up in class because the zany graphic
design teacher did; everyone was filled with angst and cynicism and everyone
thought 'intense' and 'dysfunctional' were interchangeable adjectives.

I was a bit of a misfit. I did
not smoke, I hadn't yet had my first drink and I was considered puritanical and
uptight in an environment where it was assumed that creative people were
sexually promiscuous. I don't quite remember how I ended up straying into an
unlikely involvement with a fellow student who was studying to be a
cinematographer. Quite soon I knew that the relationship was wrong for me.
Warning bells began sounding the day the man suddenly grabbed a razor blade and
opened up his wrists when we had an argument and I told him I no longer wanted
to be with him. In absolute horror I watched him wrap his scratched wrists in
strips of white Band-Aid and calmly smoke a cigarette, his eyes fixed on me in
a cold, hard stare. It could have been a bad movie, except this was my life, it
was happening to me. I knew I was being manipulated and blackmailed, yet I was
terrified. I didn't end the relationship that day.

The next time we met I was
categorical that I was not going to allow myself to be emotionally and mentally
bullied. When I told him that it was over between us he sprang up from the
floor where he had been lounging, pinned me to the ground and lay on top of me,
trying to sexually force himself on me. I slapped him. He hit me hard, grabbed
me by my arm, shoved me around, slapped me and pushed me against the wall. My
face was burning up with pain and anger. I pushed him away, walked out and took
a rickshaw back home. My right cheek was now a purplish blue mass. Initially, I
told my family that I had walked into a door.

But I had resolved that I was
never going to be a woman who would hide abuse because of a misplaced sense of
embarrassment. I was determined to complain officially to the campus authorities
and contemplated going to the police. But this was still the early nineties.
There were no sexual harassment guidelines, there was no rape law, there was no
environment of support that is available to women in these situations today.
Still, I took the faculty into confidence. Some of my teachers were progressive
feminists themselves. They were empathetic but also practical. They explained
that I still had two years of my programme left before I would get my degree.
The university was unlikely to act on a 'he said, she said' complaint.

To reiterate, at the time,
there were no mandated sexual harassment committees in existence. The Vishaka
Guidelines would only be passed in 1997 and the Domestic Violence Act even
later, in 2005. To review the options I had, I went to meet lawyers who worked
in a women's collective. Could I take this to court, I asked? They told me, as
kindly as they could, that I would spend the next two decades in court and the
fact that the violence had taken place within a relationship would only be held
against me.

I spoke to other students and
discovered that other women too had been hit and abused by the same man who had
done this to me. But they weren't willing to put their names down on any kind
of official petition asking for his expulsion. For all the fight I thought I
had in me, I was effectively helpless. The most I managed was to get myself
placed in a separate working group where I would never have to interact with
him again. As I went about my work on campus as bravely as I could, I could
hear the sniggers and the gossip behind my back. It was I who was considered
the troublemaker, not the actual perpetrator.

In 1994 when I applied for my
first job at New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) I had only one request. If
'that man' from Jamia was going to be hired as a cameraman (remember, private
television had not yet taken off in India and the pool of trained people
available was very small), I could not accept the job. They agreed. And I never
saw him again. It was perhaps the most isolating experience of my adult life.

Much later in life, I would
discover that I was not alone; almost every young woman I knew had experienced
something essentially similar-not just out on the streets, but within the
so-called safe zone. This was not startling for a country in which government
data itself shows that even today, 90 per cent of Indian women who have been
sexually abused know their assaulter. What broke us internally and what we
could not fight publicly was the abuse we experienced within the circle of
trust. We could slap the molester on the local train but were almost never able
to say out loud that among our uncles, cousins and family friends were sexual
predators who had manipulated us into feeling a shame that should have been
theirs. We buried it deep within us, unable, even years later, to excavate the
pain, the anger and the confusion.